Ignorance begat fear and fear begat religion. And it's been downhill ever since; until the day in 1953 when the dark secrets of human nature became explicable more in terms of Crick and Watson's Golden Helix than of Frazer's Golden Bough. Or so they would have us believe, those high priests of the Human Genome Project, the bounty hunters of the Brave New World of genetic manipulation and the 'selfish gene'. The dispiriting apogee to this curve of 'hope' took the form for me of a sad request from an aspiring Indian PhD student to seek the name(s) of god(s) in the sequences of DNA.

LRB 3 August 1995 | PDF Download